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February 3, 2012, 7:55 am UTC

With rising consumption of Smartphones, the number of users accessing their Facebook account on mobile devices has become rampant. Over the past year, Facebook executives had noted the growing importance of mobile devices for the company's growth. Thus, about a year ago, the company launched an initiative to get its mobile app on all mobile devices, including smartphones, feature phones, and even the Apple iPad. The result of which was skyrocketing!

Since Facebook doesn’t place third party advertising on its mobile sites and inside its applications, it generates no revenue from its mobile operations. In a world where the next billion Internet users will experience the Internet not through a PC, but through a mobile device — such as a smartphone or tablet — that’s a big problem for Silicon Valley’s brightest rising star. For Facebook finding a way to make money from all these users accessing its site from mobile phones and tablets is one of its top priorities.

Meanwhile, in what should come as no surprise to anyone, Facebook’s mobile applications are among the most downloaded in the world, and are often the first application many users download after picking up a new smartphone. Indeed, mobile Facebooking has become a key piece of social networking for high school and university students, with many of the 250 million photos uploaded to Facebook every day coming from mobile devices.

Hence, Facebook realizes that a lucid mobile strategy is the key to the company’s future revenue growth. Mobile advertising is still in its infancy. In 2010, the global market for mobile advertising was estimated to be worth about US$1.5-billion. That number is expected to grow to US$17.6-billion by 2015

If Mark Zuckerberg is serious about Facebook changing the world, about altering the way people relate to their governments and truly believes the company he started in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004 has the power to alter the nature of human connections, he’s going to have to figure out a way to make money from mobile devices.